Sticking as close as possible to the EV1 cycle route (Eurovelo 1, that goes from North Cape in Norway to the Algarve in Portugal – I’d sure like to cycle that whole 11,000 km trip one of these days!), I follow the English Channel coast all the way across Normandy, except that I bypass the Cotentin (Cherbourg) Peninsula where the D-day landings took place in 1944. I believe it would be macabre of me to gawk at the places where others not connected to me had suffered so greatly.
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Wednesday 15 August 2018. Saint-Benoît-Des-Ondes · Ouistreham |169 km|
It rained during the night on the beach at Saint-Benoit-Des-Ondes but I still managed to get away at 8.30 after allowing the tent dry out for an hour. I backtracked along the beach to where I’d arrived at the Channel coast the day before, and then continued on east along the coast, drawn by the spectre of the abbey of Mont Saint Michel hanging out over the sea on the horizon.
The Eurovelo 1 cycle route that I’d been notionally following since Roscoff is not all that clearly signposted, and in some sections doesn’t actually even exist yet. So in practically every town I had passed through I stopped at the local newsagent/ bookstore (called “Presse”) to look at or to buy maps. But hardly any of them had maps, and even if they did they typically only stock the local area survey map that covers maybe only about 40 km along my route. I did have a map for the current section of coastline I was on.
Just as I passed my map boundary that morning I encountered a hiking couple coming the other way who saw me peering at my current map and asked me for directions. The map was now useless to me since I was leaving it’s coverage area, so I marked my name, and the location and date, on one corner of it and gave it to them, asking them to do the same for someone coming back the other way when they reached the map’s other, western, edge. I sometimes wonder how many times that map traversed back and forth across eastern Brittany.
Around these parts, all roads lead to Le Mont Saint Michel, that iconic castle out in the bay, reachable by causeway at low tide. Except for the roads from the west that I was on, that is! I wasted over an hour on extremely rough tracks on the dykes and polders trying to approach the tantalising apparition shimmering in the distance, and ended up travelling at least twice the distance had I just stuck to the tarred inland road. But then I wouldn’t have anything to complain about, and it was character-building, slogging across those polders and dykes.
When I finally did get to Mont Saint Michel, I found a crass Disney Land-esque attraction. I declined the opportunity to cross the causeway with the thousands of other tourists and day-trippers, and resisted the temptation to eat in any of the scores of chain eateries or to buy souvenirs or to stay in any of the motel-hotels clustered along the main road heading out east, and just plowed on by.
I had also decided to avoid the attraction of the Normandy Beaches of World War II fame. Instead, at the town of Avranches, I just made a bee-line directly across the base of the Cherbourg Peninsula towards Caen and the channel coast proper.
The ride was hilly but nice as far as the well-heeled mountain town of Villedieu-les-Poêles. I stopped from 1 pm till 2.30 to charge up the bike batteries – and me too, with a delicious and hearty potato salad plus créme brûlée and a couple of coffees and a panaché or two for €25 all up – I kept on buying so the proprietor wouldn’t kick me out!
Villedieu-les-Poêles has a history of making articles out of copper, which is still a big cottage industry judging by all the shops selling the stuff (unless it’s all nowadays imported from China, of course!), and the inhabitants are nicknamed Sourdins (deaf ones) from all the copper-hammering they supposedly need to do.
After Villedieu, I avoided the busy A84 motorway at all costs and used the bike’s GPS to select my route heading north-east. It did ok, except that it kept persevering with a Mountain Trail Bike (MTB) version of it, even though I sternly overruled it several times. In places, it had me scrambling up steep mountain slopes through farmer’s properties on 4wd tracks that were the service roads for a string of wind turbines on the ridges. There was quite a stiff headwind blowing at times too, which didn’t endear me the route at all.
But for the last 30 km or so into Caen the terrain did level out at least, and I was able to safely follow the main D675 road in relative comfort.
I circled around Caen and then stuck to the bike paths along the river Orne and its canal as far as the Orne mouth at Ouistreham, which, I discovered, is an up-market seaside resort town in high season and was just about fully booked out everywhere.
I tried a couple of places to find accommodation and in the end was made to feel lucky indeed that I managed to get in to “Manoir Hastings” for €150. This was very expensive by my standards, but, anyway, the Michelin-starred restaurant was packed out that night for dinner, and for just another €50 I got to enjoy a mighty fine meal with wine – that’s a total cost for the day equivalent to the cost of 5 to 10 nights on the road, ordinarily-speaking.
Thursday 16 August 2018. Ouistreham · Bracquemont |167 km|
I was up bright and early and raring to go at 7.30, but then had to sit around fuming until 8.30 for the day shift to come in and open up the bike garage and the courtyard gate to let me out! I backtracked along the canal a couple of kilometers to Bénouville to cross the river, and then headed off north-east, roughly following the Normandy coastline.
It was a great morning’s ride to Honfleur, with nice beach towns along the way. Houlgate was particularly attractive. Honfleur is within sight of the industrial complex of Le Havre just across the estuary, but it has a nice olde-worlde charm of it’s own, and seems a world away from the smoking oil refineries just opposite.
And then came the horror that is the Pont de Normandie (“Bridge of Normandy”) over the River Seine. Now that was a really scary ride, with strong cross winds made doubly dangerous by the buffeting from the constant stream of large trucks whizzing by at 90km/h, less than a metre from the bike lane. It hadn’t been that straightforward getting up onto the bridge – bikes aren’t allowed onto the road approaches – however, on this occasion the GPS didn’t let me down at all, and I just blindly followed it around in seemingly ever-decreasing circles until I found myself up on the bridge deck proper.
Getting off the bridge at the other end was no simple matter either, and I ended up having to scale down a 5m embankment to avoid the vehicular traffic at the toll gates where the cycle lane ended abruptly. I’m not the only cyclist to remark on all of this, by the way – see Pont de Normandie in the Tour de Travoy blog. [Almost the identical photo to mine, actually]. Beautiful bridge, mind you.
I stopped at the town of Lillebonne to recharge. The proprietor of the café was rude to begin with – panic due to her lack of understanding of my poor French, no doubt – but another customer promptly stepped in to translate when she screeched “Isn’t anyone going to help me with this Anglo here – I cant speak English!” That I did understand!
The young lad who helped me was on a car pooling holiday, which I’d never heard of before – some website, apparently, where you put down the particulars of your travel plans to link up with car-owners going in roughly the same direction – and he was waiting in the café for a couple of hours until his free ride appeared. The lady who ran the café did become more friendly, or at least tolerant of my need to hog a seat for a couple of hours while my batteries were charging.
Dieppe seemed like a reasonable mediaeval town to loiter in, with its narrow winding streets leading down to the docks, but I pushed on regardless, to just past Bracquemont where, at a place called Berneval-Le-Grand, I had a good and cheap camp at Camping Le Val Bois, and a good and cheap dinner in their attached restaurant. It was another big day of cycling – 167 km – and it felt like I was now on the home stretch back to Maastricht.
Friday 17 August 2018. Bracquemont · Calais |191 km|
I wrote at the time: “…awful day…hardly any beach views…just a hard slog. Got disorientated and ended up going west again for 10 km”
Now, 6 months later as I write this, I find I can hardly recall anything at all about the day (hardly any photos to remind me), so I guess I’ve expunged it from my memory. There’s a lesson here: take lots of photos, and preferably with the GPS location-tagging turned on.
I do remember the bit about going-the-wrong-way, and stressing out about battery levels and stopping in a fancy restaurant out in the middle of nowhere at 11.30 at the 70 km mark to charge up, and having to wait for them to open the kitchen at 12.30, and that the meal at Logis Auberge de la Dune was expensive.
The campsite that night I do remember clearly – Les Argousiers (its the name of a bush, the Sea Buckthorn). Oh so very ordinary, but, oh, what lovely people!
The family who run it (mum, dad and the two teenaged kids) were totally stressed out hosting a rather large bingo group in their restaurant, and told me to just make myself at home on any old pitch I fancied. Which I did. However, my neighbours complained to management that I was too close to the picnic table (that we both by rights could share), and so to keep the peace the stressed-out dad politely asked if I wouldn’t mind shifting.
I complied, and reset my tent up on the very ordinary pitch the son directed me to that was opposite a site cabin. The people in the cabin, brothers Nicola (41, a forklift driver) and Julien (30, an operator in an aluminium window frame factory), plus Nicola’s wife Samantha and two kids, were from the French Ardennes. They had been staying in this (very ordinary) campground for 15 days already and were returning home the next day. They insisted I join them for dinner (the restaurant was full and I could only get 2 ice-creams and 3 beers as takeaway), and we chatted until the wee hours. Such lovely people.
-ends-